By Mashooq Badar.

Part 1 or part 2.

How do you make applications portlets available to page authors in CQ5, so page authors can design/author the complete site without requiring application releases?

CQ5 has a concept of “components” that are the building blocks for a page. The page author uses these to build a page. For example to drop an image onto a page the Page Author would use the image component. When an application portlet is developed – as part of the release process you’ll need to deploy the portlet definition on JBoss and create a corresponding page component in CQ. The components can have properties which can be fed in as “portlet preferences”. You will then need to create a replication agent that takes the configured component and creates a portlet instance descriptor (portlet-instances.xml & portlet-object.xml). This can then be deployed on to JBoss.

You will need to have a service on JBoss that the replication agent can send the descriptors to. This service can then deploy the instance on JBoss using it’s MBean interface.

Our Agile for Ebusiness Event in London Feb 2010 will feature more on this topic.